


tell rock n' roll i'm alone again

by paperclipbitch



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/M, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, References to Suicide, yes i wrote torchwood as a band because i do not learn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:11:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Band!AU. In which Torchwood have just about made it though as it turns out that doesn’t fix anything, Owen would much rather punch Ianto than shag him (honestly), and absolutely everyone seems to be Jack’s ex boyfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell rock n' roll i'm alone again

**Author's Note:**

> [originally posted on LJ summer 2010] I’ve been wanting to write a band AU for _Torchwood_ since that throwaway line in _Meat_ , although this wasn’t the way I pictured this story turning out, frankly. I do like it though even if it’s really quite weird; I don’t know if everyone’s actually in character or not, but I hopefully captured the bleak and destructive atmosphere of most of my _Torchwood_ fic if nothing else ;)

**.Track One.** ( _make us it make us hip make us scene; or shrug us off your shoulders, don’t approve a single word that we wrote_ )

Suzie’s eyes tell of her customary blend of sleepless nights and cigarettes, smudged with cheap ultra-black mascara. Her fingers beat a rhythm on the sticky tabletop, jumbled but still somehow coherent, asking for a baseline to be woven through, something hot and tight. She was a good drummer, back in the day; maybe she still is.

Owen sips his beer. “Do you ever regret leaving?

She considers him. Her mouth is flat but her eyes are laughing, and as always with Suzie, Owen can’t work out if he should know what the joke is or not.

“What,” she begins, “so I can be as happy as you are now? No fucking thanks.”

Owen wants to argue that this is unfair and that he’s perfectly happy, actually, why wouldn’t he be, but this is Suzie and she’s known him for too long for him to try and lie. He shrugs instead, drinking more beer to buy time.

“Torchwood is Jack’s dream,” Suzie tells him, “and we’re all just along for the ride. One day, I just got tired of being taken for a ride by Jack Harkness. You will too, in the end.” She grins, teeth suddenly very white, and drains her whisky on the rocks in one. “Or maybe you already have.”

“It’s too late to turn back now,” Owen points out, tone far more defeatist and far less sharp than he intended.

“Yes it is,” Suzie agrees, softly cruel, and gets to her feet. “I’ll see you, Owen,” she adds.

She walks away without looking back and, after a moment, Owen realises that she’s stuck him with the bill. He smirks, rueful, and reflects it’s the least he can do.

 

Ianto is reading that fucking NME article, the _this is Torchwood’s difficult second album, will they bugger it up?_ one, only no one uses the phrase ‘bugger it up’ at any point. It makes Owen feel low-level nauseous every time he looks at it and he hasn’t actually read it yet.

“Hey, look, you’re in here,” Ianto says, turning the article towards Lisa. Owen has no idea why Ianto’s girlfriend is even _here_ , she’s not in the band and Rhys doesn’t feel the need to be at all band meetings ever, and he’s fucking _marrying_ Gwen. Well, probably; there’s trouble in paradise, given that Gwen’s slept with most of their band and at least three people from the record company, but no one’s telling and whatever Rhys has worked out for himself, he’s not said anything.

Lisa coos over the photo of herself and Ianto, taken at the Brits last month; she looked ridiculously pretty in sparkling silver, their fingers looped together in easy intimacy. Owen grits his teeth and stares at the newspaper he’s barely reading as though his life depends on it. Gwen and Tosh are playing cards with cups of tea, boredom etched across their faces. Jack is late because Jack is always late, and no one ever bothers commenting on it anymore.

“There’s a good photo of you here,” Ianto says, and it takes Owen a moment to realise he’s talking to _him_. “Makes you look like less of a grumpy bastard.”

Owen rolls his eyes, letting a half-smirk be his only reply, and doesn’t bother looking to see which picture caught Ianto’s attention.

 

Towards the end of recording, they all have dinner over at Rhys and Gwen’s. They’ve got a pretty nice house in London – moved up from Cardiff when their first album went platinum – and the evening goes as well as can be expected when every single person in the room has slept with Gwen but isn’t telling her fiancé about it. Well, actually, to be fair, Owen’s reasonably sure that Lisa hasn’t slept with Gwen, though it’s probably only a matter of time. But Rhys is a good cook and they’ve all drunk a lot of wine and they’ve scraped through ok.

Owen and Jack are out in the back garden; it’s nearly two in the morning and they’re eating their way through all the icecream they could find hanging around in the freezer. Gwen and Rhys are arguing upstairs and occasionally sharp words fall clearly through the windows, other times it’s just background noise. Owen doesn’t know what Ianto, Lisa and Tosh are doing in the living room and doesn’t really care either; he lights another cigarette and Jack wordlessly passes him a Solero.

“How long before they call the wedding off, d’you think?” Owen asks after a while, when a door is slammed and then wrenched back open upstairs.

Jack laughs, soft and hollow. “Never,” he replies. “Rhys will marry her, whatever he does or doesn’t know. He’ll marry her because he loves her.” He looks tired in the moonlight, face a patchwork of shadows.

“But...” Owen takes a drag of his cigarette, trying to put words together. “But she’s fucked up _so badly_.”

Jack shrugs. “If you love someone enough, sometimes it doesn’t screw everything up. Sometimes you can forgive them their fuck-ups, sometimes it’s more than just chipping pieces off each other.”

Owen sighs and bites into his Solero, the ice cream too sweet and citrusy on his tongue. He’s pretty sure those are lyrics on their new album, or similar enough anyway.

“Are you still in touch with Suzie?” Jack asks abruptly.

Trying to piece all this together makes his head hurt, so Owen just shrugs. “Yeah, sometimes. When she wants to talk to me, which isn’t often.”

Jack’s mouth twists; it’s impossible to tell if it’s a smile or not.

“When did you two break up, anyway?”

Owen is about to reply when he realises that he and Suzie didn’t have that conversation.

“I don’t think we ever did,” he mumbles, stubbing the cigarette out on the stones of the shitty little patio.

Jack laughs, a twisted sound. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Owen sighs, “oh.”

 

On the penultimate day of recording, it transpires that Tosh is in whatever passes for a relationship these days with one of the sound technicians.

“He’s creepy,” Owen decides, watching the two of them laughing behind glass.

“Adam’s pretty cool,” Jack replies, smile just a little too wide.

“You’re only saying that because he’s your drug dealer,” Owen mutters.

“ _Ex_ drug dealer,” Jack snaps, getting up and leaving him to go and bother Tosh and Adam. Owen shrugs, unapologetic, because it’s hard to tell what’s _Jack_ some days and what’s illegal substances and anyway he can never keep track of what wagons Jack’s on or falling off of on any given week.

“Ex boyfriend too, I’ll wager,” Ianto murmurs from behind Owen, and Owen ducks his head to hide the beginnings of a smile.

“Isn’t everyone?” he asks, and Ianto just shrugs. “So what do you think of Adam?”

Ianto looks thoughtful for a while before he says: “he’s made Tosh stop looking at you in a desperate fashion that kind of makes me want to punch you, so that’s a nice change.”

Owen is sharply reminded of all the reasons he hates Ianto, really fucking _hates_ him, and he turns away. “You’re a real bastard, you know?”

“So I’m told,” Ianto replies, tone flat and almost amused.

 

“What’s this?” Suzie asks, arching an eyebrow. She’s stoned, pupils blown, but she’s holding it together well. She always did.

Owen shrugs uncomfortably, but says: “it’s a CD.”

“I can see that, weirdly enough,” Suzie tells him, the corners of her mouth lifting. She looks tired, really fucking tired, and Owen wants to reach across the table and hold her and have it mean something.

They’re in the bar of a hotel that’s far too expensive and tasteful for them, but what the hell, maybe they can branch out.

“It’s _From Out Of The Rain_ ,” Owen tells her, then classifies: “it’s the second album.”

“Oh.” Suzie frowns down at the innocuous-looking disk in its thin plastic envelope, one of the advance copies that Owen nicked because he wanted Suzie to have it. He’s not sure why. 

“Just take it,” Owen says. “Break it, sell it to the press, upload it to the internet, I don’t care, just please take it.”

Suzie’s smile twists, hair falling over her face. “Ok, Jesus, ok.”

Owen is about to say more when two giggly and drunk girls come up to them, breathing _you’re Owen Harper_ like it’s actually something significant, an achievement, holding out napkins for autographs and gushing about how much they love the first album, they can’t wait for the second. When they’re gone, Suzie bursts out laughing.

“Shut up,” Owen mutters, draining his glass and gesturing for another.

“I don’t know why you ever wanted to get famous,” Suzie murmurs, “you hate people.” She smirks, broad and fierce. “A little bird called the internet told me you guys are touring in America, as of next month.”

“Yeah, America like us,” Owen shrugs, “God knows why.”

Suzie’s smile softens and she leans sideways to kiss him, mouth soft and cold and she pulls away too fast. “You’re all going to kill each other,” she says.

“Yeah,” Owen agrees, “yeah, we probably are.”

Suzie slides off her barstool, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Good luck out there in the world,” she says, fingers curling over the CD.

“You too,” Owen replies, and watches her leave.

**.Track Two.** ( _jump onto the bus and ride around with all of us; we’ll go out on the town and light it up ‘til we burn it down_ )

Right now, Owen would kind of like to either be so famous that they can travel by private jet everywhere, or not be famous at all so he doesn’t have to make this bloody trip. Either would do. It’s too early in the morning and everyone is bleary-eyed; his bass has just gone into the hold and Owen is not entirely certain that it won’t get broken by crazy baggage-handlers somewhere between here and America. Ianto and Lisa are all over each other in a way that’s hugely inappropriate given that they’re somewhere well-lit and _public_ , and Owen doesn’t look because well, it’s none of his fucking business and also Lisa is wearing far too much silver. Owen knows all about signature colours by now thanks to Gwen and Tosh but still, she could give it a rest from time to time.

“You look cheerful,” Tosh remarks. She looks much too put-together for a four a.m flight, she has make-up on and everything. Owen kind of hates her for it.

“No Adam?” he asks, deflecting.

She shrugs, eyes sweeping over Gwen and Rhys and the deeply intent conversation they appear to be having. “We’re casual,” she says.

“Ok,” Owen shrugs, and looks down at his trainers. He looks up a moment later as Jack slings an arm around his shoulders, burning brighter than anybody has any right to burn. He’s also wearing what are probably the world’s hugest sunglasses. “ _Why_?” he asks.

Jack seems to understand immediately; his smile has a million kinds of teeth in it. “I asked the woman in the shop to help me find the pair that made me look most like an asshole,” he explains. “Aren’t they _awesome_?”

There are several more months of this. “Oh dear God,” Owen mumbles, and Jack laughs.

 

Owen falls face-first onto his hotel room bed and is unconscious fairly quickly after that; he gets to be semi-famous and jetlagged for the next few days and their album has been number one in the UK for the last three weeks. Suzie laughed a lot about it when she rang him up to say goodbye; once again amused by a joke that no one else gets.

When he wakes up the shower’s going and Ianto’s bed is slept-in but empty now. Owen blinks exhaustion out of his eyes and wonders for the millionth time why Jack always gets his own room – other than the fact he’s going to fuck everyone they come across on this tour so probably needs his own space to do that in – and he always ends up with Ianto. He and Ianto have never liked each other and probably never will; close proximity makes them civil to one another but the jagged edges of interaction have never worn smooth.

Sighing, Owen rolls off his bed and finds his cigarettes, opening the window from habit and curling himself up on the sill, breathing smoke out over the street of an unfamiliar city, half-listening to Ianto softly singing in the shower. It sounds a lot like _Everything Changes_ , that first single that wasn’t supposed to go anywhere but did, but Ianto isn’t singing his own lines; he’s singing Jack’s. 

Owen wishes he could say he was surprised but he isn’t.

“You’re awake then,” Ianto says when he comes out.

Owen pictures him, dripping and almost entirely bare, wet hair a ragged mess, and doesn’t turn around. It’s too early in the tour for that, he’s not used to it yet. It’s ok; he will be.

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly, and they don’t push for conversation.

 

Gwen is fiddling with her engagement ring, turning it around and around and around on her finger. It’s pretty, subtle, and the magazines love that she’s going to marry the man she met at university, that they’re together and happy. 

Owen has stories he won’t ever tell about long evenings just after Gwen joined the band, too much alcohol and too much confusion and her legs wrapped around his hips, her fingers curled into his skin. It felt good and it _helped_ , it helped with the ache that came from Suzie just walking away one day and leaving them with no drummer and no fucking idea what they should be doing with themselves. They stopped quickly enough, a spattering of shags over a handful of weeks and they don’t even _think_ about it anymore, honestly, but Suzie seemed to know anyway and Owen doesn’t think she ever really forgave him for it.

It’s possible that they’re actually dating, even if they haven’t had sex in over a year and they don’t see each other more often than once a month. Things are complicated with Suzie; they always are.

They get their tour bus tomorrow, the claustrophobic space that’s going to take them across the country and that’s never fun, the five of them stacked on top of each other with their own private insanities that quickly become ever more public because they can’t get away from each other. They toured the UK last summer, did a few festivals across Europe; Gwen and Tosh ended up having sex at _least_ four times and Owen gave Ianto a black eye while they were in Germany and Jack fell off the wagon twice and did one show so high they had to take him to hospital afterwards.

“I do miss him, you know,” Gwen says quietly, lower lip caught between her teeth, fingers on the ring Rhys gave her.

This is not a conversation Owen wants to have over pancakes and coffee while jetlagged, so he merely shrugs and says: “good for you,” with as much brutality as he can get into his tone.

Something like a rueful smile tugs at Gwen’s lips and she reaches for the syrup.

 

Tosh and Gwen have managed to snag bunks together and you don’t want to sleep above or below Jack; he usually has company and it’s bad enough _listening_ to it without trying to sleep with the whole bed structure shaking, so Owen huffs a sigh and resigns himself to having a bunk above Ianto’s, like usual. The tourbus is just like the other buses they’ve had; carefully compact, with curtained bunks to sleep in with a semblance of privacy, a sleeping area with a small kitchenette type thing, and a bathroom about the size of a cupboard. There’s no space to avoid anyone, but at least they can be certain that the bus will stay tidy; Ianto is neat to the point of mental illness, relieves the stress of touring by clearing up their shit. They leave him to it nowadays; everyone has their ways of keeping themselves sane, or at least towards the quiet, socially accepted forms of insanity.

“Are you ready for this?” Jack asks, when they’re all sprawled on sofas, bags lugged onboard and everything packed up for departure.

Ianto laughs. “Fuck no,” he says, and they all echo the sentiment, amusement threaded through their voices. It’s been a couple of years now, a successful first album and a second one, now, that’s selling so fast it’s almost scary, and yet they all feel as though it’s come from nowhere, like someone’s going to turn up one day and take it all away.

Owen doesn’t know if he’d feel relieved if that happened or not and tries not to think about it too much.

“We deserve this, you know,” Jack says, uncharacteristically serious, “we _deserve_ this. Remember that.”

Owen thinks about arguing about this and then remembers the hours they spent bickering with each other, Gwen throwing drumsticks and Tosh disappearing for hours, crumpled sheets of music and lyrics, disjointed sets of words scribbled on napkins and the edges of old newspapers, scraps of consciousness shoved together and moulded until the album came ripping out of it all, beautiful and almost perfect and, best of all, sounding effortless. They’re going to go out on the stage and sing the words they fought over for hours until everyone’s feelings were stinging and the floor was swimming in discarded efforts, and they’re going to look like the end result was what they meant all along.

“Yeah,” he says softly, “we really bloody do.”

The others look almost startled but he ignores them, holding out his hand. The others pile theirs on top and they exchange embarrassed looks before shouting _Torchwood!_ and pulling apart.

_Well_ , Owen thinks beneath his smile, _here we go..._

**.Track Three.** ( _you can’t just up and leave me; i’m the singer in a band_ )

The first time Owen met Jack he was still struggling with the medical degree he would later give up on, invited to a party by his friend-stroke-ex who he never learned to say no to. 

(Dianne, who was _beautiful_ and presumably still is; Owen wrote _Out Of Time_ on their first album for her. They haven’t spoken in over a year and he’s still not sure whose fault that is. Probably his; he knows he holds her responsible for him joining Torchwood and all the shit that’s happened since, even the shit that no one could have predicted. They leave _Out Of Time_ off most of their setlists now, though the internet claims it’s a fan favourite. Dianne’s a pilot now; Owen thinks Tosh is still in touch with her.)

“Owen _Harper_ ,” an American voice said, a heavy arm landing around his shoulders. “About damn time we met.”

Owen looked up and saw Jack’s blinding grin for the first time, the grin that’s sold a million records since. It was bright and shiny and a little lopsided at the edges – Jack was clearly drunk – and it was bordering on breathtaking. He can acknowledge that now, though he couldn’t for a long time.

“Um,” he said, because he wasn’t drunk yet and Jack’s grip was really _tight_ , “who are you?”

Jack seemed surprised that he didn’t know – he was kind of infamous, though Owen wouldn’t find that out for another week – but laughed anyway; that rich, rolling laugh that has talked Owen into far too many things since.

“I’m Jack Harkness,” he explained, sweeping a hand back through his hair in a way that should’ve been cheesy and yet somehow worked. Jack gets away with a lot of shit that way, actually. “Dianne’s told me _all_ about you.”

Owen glanced around, managed to find Dianne and glared furiously at her. She was laughing in a corner with a woman who would later turn out to be Tosh. Dianne winked and turned away, leaving Owen to Jack’s questionable mercy.

“So, Owen,” Jack drawled, arm tightening around him, “I hear that you play bass...”

 

Tosh was a lot more stammery back then, hiding her face behind oversized glasses and her body underneath oversized sweaters, haircut just the right side of bad and her lips caught too often between her teeth. What she _did_ have going for her, though, were her fingers or, more specifically, what those fingers could do on a keyboard. She’d been trained in classical piano when she was younger, but bastardised that when she got to university, and Owen forgot that she was geeky and shy and hadn’t spoken more than about three words to him without blushing, mumbling, and pulling the cuffs of her jumper over her palms the first time he heard her play. He watched Tosh’s fingers leaping over the keys and jumped when Suzie kicked in on the drums, grinning when he looked her way, and a moment later Jack was layering his voice over the two of them, that voice that would get them heard on the internet and the radio and _remembered_ a little over a year later.

“You in?” Jack asked when they’d finished, breathless and grinning, hair a wicked dark mess and eyes alight.

Owen looked at Tosh, who’d gone back to flushing at her keyboard and avoiding everyone’s eyes, and then at Suzie, who was tapping her drumsticks against her knee with one hand and winding a lock of hair around her fingers with the other. She was wearing far too much mascara and her dress was slipping off one shoulder; she looked simultaneously fragile and sexy, and her eyes promised him something though he wasn’t sure what it was.

He looked back to Jack, Jack who had so much charisma that it bled off him in palpable waves, and thought about all the things he wasn’t doing at university.

“Yeah,” he said, “ok. I’m in.”

 

Ianto worked in the Starbucks nearest to campus, apparently, though Owen was never served coffee by him so possibly that was a story Jack made up because it was more interesting than the alternative. Owen preferred bass guitar so they were still looking for a lead guitarist, searching out friends of friends and having Jack accost them at parties. Jack was always good at accosting people randomly at parties – Tosh has sworn that’s how Jack got her, too – but they hadn’t yet found anyone willing to say yes, even when faced with Suzie’s bedroom eyes and Jack’s screamingly epic charisma. 

(Owen sometimes reflects that he might have given in a little too easily.)

“I could learn guitar, I suppose,” Dianne mumbled, head in Owen’s lap one afternoon.

“Didn’t we break up?” Owen asked, fingers carding idly through her hair.

“Eighteen months ago,” Dianne agreed cheerfully. 

“Just checking,” Owen said. 

She laughed, bright and brilliant, and dug in her pocket for a cigarette – when Owen inevitably gets lung cancer in a few years’ time, he’s blaming her – fluttering her eyelashes at him.

“I don’t want to join your band anyway,” she said.

Owen was formulating a reply when the door opened and Jack and Suzie came trailing in, accompanied by a tall guy with ridiculously long hair and a sheepish little smile.

“This is Ianto,” Suzie explained brightly, “and yes, that is more of a sneeze than a name, but he’s our guitarist.” Her hands were quaking and she was speaking just a little too fast, pupils blown wide.

“You play guitar?” Owen asked, which was a stupid question but there was something about the shape of Ianto’s smile that made his stomach clench and that irritated him.

Ianto’s smile slipped into something like a smirk. “And I make a mean latte,” he added.

“He does,” Suzie agreed swiftly, and Owen wondered if whatever it was that she was on was ok to be mixed with caffeine.

Jack spread his arms, wide, like he was picturing something magnificent that the rest of them couldn’t – he did that a lot, in those early days – and said: “we’ve got ourselves a band.”

 

The first year of being in Torchwood was kind of weird and kind of ok; they played gigs their friends got them in pubs and bars, they wrote songs that they then dismissed as being too pretentious, they added _I’m in a band_ to their pick-up line résumés, they cut and recut their hair, they all fell into bed with Jack at least once, and there was this one time when Owen and Ianto got so drunk on cheap tequila at a party that they ended up making out for half an hour in the back of a car that didn’t belong to either of them.

(Owen thinks Ianto doesn’t remember. Ianto actually does.)

 

The first time Owen had sex with Suzie was also the day after she quit. Dianne had sent a demo tape to a handful of record labels in what turned out to be utter seriousness, though the rest of them assumed it was a joke, and they’d got some unexpected interest. Suzie had promptly quit the band after hearing this, saying she never wanted to take it anywhere, had never wanted this anyway.

Jack had thrown a lamp at her head; Tosh took Suzie outside while Owen and Ianto talked Jack down. There was something pure and unnaturally angry about Jack, angrier than the situation really demanded, but they exchanged looks and elected not to ask him. Jack had hundreds of stories and not all of them were pretty or funny or repeatable.

Suzie didn’t talk about it when Owen went over to her flat the next day to speak to her, to try and get some answers. 

“I don’t want it,” she explained, and she was too sober, dark eyes bright and shivering for a whole other reason. “I joined this band for something that doesn’t exist anymore, that maybe didn’t exist to begin with, and I can’t do this anymore, I can’t drag this farce into public. I can’t and fuck it, Owen, I won’t. I _won’t_.”

“Ok,” Owen replied, soft, “ok, it’s ok, Suze. It’s ok.”

She laughed, hollow, and fell into his arms, burying her face in his neck and still laughing. 

“How long have you been in love with Jack?” Owen asked her quietly, and she sat back fast, as though she’d been burned.

“Shut up,” she snapped, cold and sharp, and when she kissed him a moment later he could still taste the words on her lips, over and over as her hair tangled through his fingers. _Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up_.

 

“Don’t come back until you’ve got me a drummer,” Jack said. He’d been drunk for a week and was now hungover and damnably sober, blue eyes wide and just a little mad. He wasn’t talking about Suzie (he hasn’t spoken about her since, not until that night in Gwen’s garden, hidden in the darkness) and something was broken, betrayed, in his eyes and his smile.

He slammed the door in their faces and they stared at each other for a long moment; Tosh looked tired and Ianto’s expression was unreadable. 

“Any ideas?” Tosh asked at last. 

_I’m sleeping with Suzie_ , Owen wanted to say, but didn’t. He didn’t think it would help.

“There’s a girl in my seminar,” Ianto offered, “she can play the drums. We talked about it a few weeks ago, she saw a couple of our gigs.”

“And what are we going to say to her?” Owen demanded, voice harsher than he’d meant it to be. “‘Come join our band, we’ve got a crazy lead singer who might have a meltdown if you don’t’?”

Ianto glared at him. “No,” he said at last, “somehow I think I’ll phrase it somewhat differently.”

A day later, she materialised into Gwen Cooper, a nervous but charming smile on her lips and Jack’s eyes lit up like something holy had been salvaged. Two weeks after Gwen joined Torchwood, Suzie left university and moved out of London. Three days after that, Gwen seemed to forget that she had a boyfriend and Owen fucked her on the sofa after half a bottle of vodka.

He’s _got_ to get better coping mechanisms.

**.Track Four.** ( _but i swore i would never fall in love with a boy in a rock n’ roll band_ )

A teenage girl who may or may not be legal – what the fuck are the age consent laws in the states, anyway? – asks Owen to sign her breasts after a show and he does, bemused, because he can’t think of a good reason to say no. Tosh laughs, dark hair still streaked through with golden stage glitter; it catches the lights, bright and vivid, while their fans scream.

“Why do teenage girls want me to sign their breasts?” he asks later, ears still ringing; Jack and Gwen got the first after-show showers, and so he, Tosh and Ianto are still waiting, sweating eyeliner down their cheekbones, muscles stiff and skin singing with adrenaline. He turns to Ianto. “Shouldn’t they be going after Jack? Or you?”

Tosh is giggling like she knows something he doesn’t, and Ianto’s smirk is nothing short of evil.

“Weirdly enough, some of our fans do find you attractive, Owen,” he replies. “According to the last forum I was on, it’s your cheekbones. And your brooding.”

“I don’t brood!” Owen protests.

“ _We_ know you’re a grumpy sod,” Tosh explains, “but the fans don’t. They mistake your hatred for people in general as inner turmoil.”

“The eyeliner helps,” Ianto adds, grin still a little cruel. “They think you’re _tortured_. Like that vampire guy in _Twilight_.”

“I will punch you in the face,” Owen assures him.

Ianto shrugs. “What, again?”

“Maybe we should start making ‘Team Owen’ t-shirts,” Tosh suggests mildly. “They could sparkle.”

There’s a no smoking sign on the opposite wall, but Owen pulls a cigarette out of his jeans anyway.

 

It’s weird, the first few shows, working their new material in. They know their old stuff so well they could play it backwards – and did, once, for a load of stoned festival-goers in Spain last summer who screamed so loud Owen could feel it reverberating through his teeth for days afterwards – so that’s easy enough, but the new stuff is still, well, new; Ianto and Jack still dancing around each other’s vocals without the ease that usually comes from that, Owen concentrating harder than usual on Gwen’s beat so he can tie his own notes into it. 

They’re still number one in the UK. _From Out Of The Rain_ is selling ridiculously well despite the fact Owen hates the ridiculous pretentious circus characters etched creepily on the cover, while their first single from the album, _Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang_ , is hanging around the top twenty. It’s a good album, Owen thinks one night, listening to Tosh’s voice twine with Ianto’s on _To The Last Man_ – what passes for an angsty break-up ballad with them, despite the fact no one’s broken up with anyone and the whole thing’s so heavily layered with metaphors that it scarcely makes sense anymore – while Jack twirls the microphone stand for a screaming crowd, and wonders why he didn’t notice this before. 

He leans into his own microphone to lend backing vocals, sweaty fingers skimming down the frets, and hears a handful of women in the crowd scream his name. 

It’s at times like this that it’s pretty damn hard to remember that he’s fucking unhappy.

 

Owen doesn’t bother asking why Ianto is descaling their kettle at three in the morning. They’re not stopping tonight, the bus driving inexorably along, and when he looks out the window he can only see blackness and the occasional flash of orange light from the highway outside.

“Can’t sleep?” Ianto asks, tone neutral.

“Nah.” Owen drops onto the sofa but doesn’t bother trying to find a cigarette anywhere; no smoking on the bus is basically rule number one and while arguing with Ianto is one way to resolve his tension, he’s not in the mood tonight. It takes a while to get used to sleeping in the same room as the others, to sleeping in a bunk on a bus instead of on a proper bed. It’ll become second nature soon enough; he just has to wait. “What about you?”

Ianto peers into the kettle, expression thoughtful. He looks completely different to the way he looks onstage, all confident smile and artfully smudged eyeliner, effortlessly stealing the spotlight from Jack only to throw it back again, brighter than ever before; right now his hair is a mess, he hasn’t shaved, and the black t-shirt and boxers he sleeps in are crumpled.

“Just got off the phone with Lisa,” he says.

“Right,” Owen says, in a tone that doesn’t invite conversation. He sighs, and remembers that there are times not to be a dick, and three a.m. is one of them. “She ok?”

“Yeah.” Ianto offers him a brief smile, unreadable and fleeting. “England’s a long way away, you know? Or it seems it anyway. Some nights.”

Owen can’t help thinking that this would all be much easier if he could just _like_ Lisa; she’s nice, she’s pretty, she clearly makes Ianto happy. All of which are problems, actually, but whatever.

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly, because that’s what the early hours of the morning are for. For feeling like this. “At least our kettle will be obnoxiously clean.”

Ianto’s mouth flickers. “Attempting to comfort me, Owen?” he asks; his tone is teasing but there’s a real question somewhere in there too. “Should I check the bus for mind-altering substances?”

“I assume all the mind-altering substances are going to be in Jack’s suitcase,” Owen replies.

He can tell from the look on Ianto’s face that he knows that Owen’s avoiding the first question and avoiding it _badly_ , but he doesn’t mention it.

 

There’s an afterparty and it’s pretty good; Gwen is flirting shamelessly with one of their roadies but Owen lets it happen because, well, if that’s what she needs to be happy then fuck it, why not? Jack is the centre of the party because he’s the centre of all parties and Owen’s doing such a good job of not looking at all at Ianto that he’s lost track of him completely. He mingles obediently for a while, meeting people in bands that he’s heard of and bands that he hasn’t, smiles way more than he really wants to, and then heads for the bar.

Tosh joins him after a while – she’s much more fun to hang out with now she’s apparently got over her debilitating crush on him, though Owen has just enough tact not to say this aloud – and they’re just debating the merits of tracking down a pool table from somewhere when Tosh sucks in a breath through her teeth.

“This is not going to end well,” she says quietly.

Owen twists around to see just what Tosh is looking at and can’t help but agree. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says softly.

The Time Agents, despite having the world’s most fucking stupid name, are Torchwood’s biggest rivals; there are five of them, they have a girl drummer too, and they also have a possibly insane but definitely charismatic frontman. Namely, John Hart. 

“He’s better looking in person,” Tosh says, sounding dumbstruck.

“And I thought _I_ had good cheekbones,” Owen mumbles.

Half the party is staring, wary, clearly waiting for someone to attack. Jack is still drinking nothing but mineral water so at least he isn’t drunk, but God knows what John Hart is on – stories of his exploits in rehab basically keep the tabloids in print – and the air is tense. Gwen has stopped trying to snog the face off Random Roadie Guy, and Ianto materialises out of nowhere over Tosh’s left shoulder.

“How bad is this going to be, scale of one to ten?” he asks quietly.

Owen shrugs; who the fuck knows. Jack’s wildly unpredictable, which is great if you’re an adoring fan but not so great if you’re his bandmate.

No one says anything for a long moment and then John Hart punches Jack in the face.

“I hate our lives,” Owen remarks to no one in particular.

Jack gives back as good as he gets and they go crashing through a table – Ianto buries his face in his hands – while Owen sighs and orders them all vodka shots.

Somewhere around the time Owen is wondering just what a broken nose is going to do to Jack’s singing voice, Jack and John stop punching each other and start kissing instead. The few people who _weren’t_ filming the fight on their phones whip their cameras out.

“Well, this is going to look good on youtube,” Tosh remarks.

“Admit it, you fucker,” John gasps out, “ _Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang_ was written about me.”

Ianto sighs loudly. “Why is everyone _always_ Jack’s ex boyfriend?”

 

It’s not a good sound check. There are a thousand and one technical difficulties, Jack has about ten lovebites and is looking irritatingly pleased with himself, and everyone winds up snapping and shouting at each other as they try to get everything working smoothly. 

In the end, Owen can’t handle it anymore and he walks out, claiming he needs a fag though when he gets outside he doesn’t want one anymore, so he just sits down on the pavement with his back against the wall. About ten minutes later, Ianto joins him.

“Are Tosh and Gwen having a bitchfight?” Owen asks. “Because I’m pretty sure I left instructions to come and get me if that happened.”

“You are a misogynistic arsehole,” Ianto replies mildly. “No, I just wanted some air. We’ve all got to calm down sometime.”

“Really?” Owen asks. “What do you expect, Ianto, we’re a band who’ve all fucked each other, of course we’re going to be shit at being civil.”

Ianto’s lips quirk. “Speak for yourself.”

Owen raises an eyebrow. “Who _haven’t_ you slept with?”

“Tosh,” Ianto says simply. He turns to look at Owen, expression unreadable. “We haven’t slept together either, by the way.”

Sometimes, Owen genuinely forgets that. The way he feels about Ianto is frequently so complicated that he kind of assumes that they must have shagged at some point. But they really haven’t.

“Jesus,” he says quietly, and Ianto just sits beside him, not quite close enough to touch, and laughs.

**.Track Five.** ( _he took it all too far; but boy could he play guitar_ )

The first couple of times Owen put eyeliner on he nearly blinded himself and ended up looking like a panda on cocaine, which wasn’t really in any way attractive. 

Now, of course, he’s so good at it that he’s done long before the others have finished their own stage make-up. Tosh and Gwen are both in gold, matching golden glitter streaked through their hair and across their eyes, while Jack is playing with his hair and laughing at himself in the mirror. Ianto’s hair is growing too long, long enough to curl around his ears, and Owen doesn’t find that at all tempting so he isn’t looking at Ianto, carefully leaning into the mirror in a pair of sinfully tight pinstriped trousers.

Ianto’s sense of style when in public is ridiculously fucked-up; all carefully tailored tight suits, shirts and waistcoats. He looks stupid. The fans love it. 

“John said he was coming tonight,” Jack says, drawing Owen’s attention. He sounds gleefully smug.

“What’s the story with you and John, anyway?” Gwen asks, because somehow she can get away with asking things like this when the rest of them can’t.

Jack shrugs. “I was in his band years ago.”

They all turn to look at him. “You were a _Time Agent_?” Ianto demands.

“Yeah,” Jack says, and grins around at all of them. Owen is tempted to tell him he’s a fucking liar, but the problem is you genuinely can’t tell when Jack is lying and when he isn’t. It’s a nightmare.

“So what happened?” Gwen again, managing to sound sympathetic rather than morbidly curious like the rest of them.

“Come on,” Jack says, grinning, “you’ve _met_ me. I’m no one’s backing singer.”

 

Owen’s mum is still waiting for him to get a proper job, which is grating. They’ve never seen eye to eye about anything, ever, so it’s not like he’s expecting her to be thrilled that he’s in a band, regardless of the fact said band is kind of successful and paid for her to get a damn conservatory last summer. She calls him up one afternoon, handling the time difference impressively, and by the end of the conversation Owen has slammed his knuckles three times into the wall and one of them is bleeding.

The crew always have booze lying around, which is helpful of them.

 

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” Tosh sighs. 

“Fuck, Owen,” Gwen says. “Get drunk during a show; yes. Get drunk after a show; well, that’s practically compulsory. But you do not get drunk _before_ a show, that’s just bloody irresponsible.”

“Can you stop screaming at me?” Owen says with all the patience he can muster, leant against the wall. “Go away and get dressed like a slut for all those people who aren’t your fiancé.”

Gwen slaps him, but she does leave.

“That was uncalled for,” Tosh says, but she looks like she’d quite like to smile. 

“You can go too, Tosh,” Owen tells her. “I’m sure you could be more glittery than you are.”

Tosh considers him for a long moment. “Just how much did you drink, Owen?”

“Don’t make me have to think up something insulting to make you leave too,” Owen says earnestly.

Tosh sighs. “All right.”

The minute he’s left alone in the corridor Owen bends his knees until he slides down the wall and ends up sitting on the floor, more or less. He sighs, knowing he’s being stupid and not caring right now. He can hold it together; he’s performed in worse states than this. Admittedly, that was a few years ago now, but he can still do it.

“Well done.” Ianto’s voice is sharp and dry and Owen has no idea when he got here or why he’s even bothering.

“Oh, fuck off, Ianto,” Owen tells him. “I have thousands and thousands of friends on facebook and you know, none of them are you.”

A minute later, and Ianto’s gone too.

 

Mostly to spite the rest of the band, Owen concentrates and is absolutely _perfect_ all the way through their set. His mum might think he’s useless and heading for failure, but she’s his _mum_ , she’s allowed to think that, she’s always thought that, whatever, but the others don’t get to think that about him. They don’t have to like him, they don’t have to respect him, they don’t even have to want to sleep with him the way he definitely _doesn’t_ want to sleep with them, but they don’t get to think they could do better without him. They don’t.

Owen might have talked their crew into letting him have beer onstage instead of water, but it’s not like the others can say anything to him. Gwen’s eyes are narrow and she beats the drums like she’s seeing his face beneath the sticks, while Tosh keeps shooting concerned glances his way, but Jack’s on _fire_ tonight so all eyes are on him. Owen doesn’t miss the way Ianto doesn’t even glance at him at any point, not even accidentally, but fuck Ianto, seriously, just _fuck_ him.

“Thank you, Owen, you’re _such_ a charmer,” Ianto says later, when they’re offstage and he’s manhandling Owen back to their dressing room. “Are you going to be sick on me?”

“No,” Owen snaps, “though that waistcoat deserves it, seriously, who even _wears_ waistcoats anymore?”

“Oh look,” Ianto mutters, “you turn into Gok Wan when you’re hammered. Always nice to know.” He pushes Owen into a chair, movements brisk and sharp.

Owen folds himself over a table, pressing his head to its cold surface. “You’re the one who’s in love with Jack,” he mumbles, and doesn’t hear Ianto’s reply.

 

“Just get him out of here,” Jack is saying, low and hard.

Owen doesn’t remember the journey to the hotel – at least they’re not sleeping on the bus tonight – but they make it there eventually, Ianto’s mouth a thin hard line. He’s not talking and that’s fine because Owen has nothing at all to say to Ianto Sodding Jones. Nothing at all.

Ianto gets a keycard and shoves him into the lift, not bothering to be gentle and Owen suspects that there’ll be bruises tomorrow. Ianto likes to think he’s all saintly with his cleaning products and his fucking holier-than-thou attitude, but he’s a cunt at heart.

“Could you just _stop talking_ ,” Ianto says tightly. “Or could you at least not call me a cunt publicly, this is going to look bad enough on Oh No They Didn’t as it is.”

Owen obediently stays quiet until Ianto has dragged him into a room, slamming the door and not bothering to put a light on.

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?” Ianto demands, hushed but hard, voice literally trembling with anger.

“What the hell do you care?” Owen demands, trying to pull himself out of Ianto’s grip and nearly stumbling over.

“You cannot do this, Owen,” Ianto hisses. “You can’t.”

“Right,” Owen says, “because Jack can fuck people across buffet tables if he wants to but I can’t _possibly_ ever get drunk, of course.”

“That’s not what this is and you know it,” Ianto tells him.

“Oh, fuck you, Ianto,” Owen snarls. “You don’t get it, ok? You don’t get it because you’re the perfect one, the charming one, the nice one, the pretty one, the one who doesn’t ever fuck up or step out of line or get told he’s a useless fucking twat who’ll never make anything of himself. I bet you’ve never done anything wrong in your life, you were always there as a goody-fucking-two-shoes, you’ve never, ever ever fucked anything up-”

Ianto shuts him up by pressing their mouths together. It’s awful and furious, their chapped lips sliding against each other, Owen fisting his hands in Ianto’s stupid shirt just to keep himself upright, teeth clashing, Ianto’s fingers digging too hard into his arms. Abruptly, Ianto pulls away and pushes Owen onto the bed so hard Owen bounces and his head spins.

“Get some sleep, Owen,” Ianto snaps, and slams the door behind him.

 

None of them ever talk about that night again. It’s probably for the best.

**.Track Six.** ( _and i never meant to hurt you when i wrote you ten love songs_ )

There’s a certain point when you kind of become convinced that you’ve been touring for forever and the rest of your life is just a hallucination, and you’re just going to stay touring for ever and ever and ever until you die.

They all get restless around this point, staying silent on the bus rather than trying to start conversations that will only end in shouting. It’s like living in a shoebox, Owen feels, being let out periodically to scream at the world in heat and noise before they’re packed back up again and the lid is closed tight.

He spends half a sound check watching the line of Ianto’s back and telling himself that he isn’t, because fuck knows what’s going on there but he should stop thinking about it because really, punching Ianto would just be so _satisfying_ , and the other half bickering with Gwen over a rhythm change in _Sleeper_.

“You’re a dick, Owen,” Tosh tells him later, sounding actually cross with him, arms folded.

“Are you going somewhere with this?” Owen asks. “Because I’ve heard that before.”

Tosh huffs. “I’m so glad I’m not in love with you anymore,” she says.

“I’m pretty sure you still are,” Owen replies, because pushing buttons is a specialty of his. “Somewhere deep down.”

She looks sad and annoyed, and sighs heavily. “I really hate you sometimes,” she murmurs, “and I wish I didn’t because I don’t think you deserve to be hated, not really, though when you’re there acting like it’s a huge deal that I’m the only person in the band you haven’t slept with-”

“I haven’t shagged Ianto either,” Owen interrupts.

Tosh looks startled, and all the anger seems to melt away instantly. “You haven’t?” He shakes his head. She comes to sit beside him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Oh, you poor, poor sod.”

Owen doesn’t ask for clarification. He’s not even sure he needs it.

He doesn’t know how long they sit there, but eventually Jack comes in, looking pale and solemn and completely unlike himself.

“Are you ok?” Tosh asks.

Jack tries to speak, can’t, and tries again. “It’s Suzie,” he says, voice cracking, and Owen feels absolutely frozen.

 

They cancel the show, of course, because when your ex-band member kills themselves it’s pretty tasteless to go on, and anyway Owen’s hands are trembling so hard he’s not even sure that he could play right now.

Owen wishes he could say that it was a surprise. It’s a shock, yes, and he feels so paralysed it’s a wonder that he’s still breathing, but it’s not a surprise. Part of him feels like he’s been waiting for this ever since he met her, that smile that wasn’t quite steady or whole shivering on her face.

He can’t believe that this is really his life now; he was going to be a _doctor_ , he was going to do something that _mattered_ , and now he’s stranded in America with stale eyeliner caked around his eyes because it’s got to the point where it just won’t come off anymore, fingertips blistered from a bass guitar and a probable-ex-girlfriend dead back in London. He can’t even cry, though he wants to, desperately.

Tosh can cry, and does, face buried in Gwen’s shoulder. Gwen looks quietly stunned but it isn’t her loss and she knows it; she never really knew Suzie and it was probably just as well. Jack disappeared a little after breaking the news and his phone is switched off; Ianto is gone too, and Owen idly entertains the idea that maybe he’s breaking into the houses of total strangers, just to give him something to tidy.

“Why would she _do_ something like this?” Tosh demands, helpless and tired, and Owen wonders if Suzie and Tosh still spoke; he kind of hopes they did, Suzie was ultimately responsible for giving Tosh every shred of the confidence she has now so she can stride onto that stage like a queen and sing to crowds of hundreds, thousands, without blushing and retreating to her jumpers again.

Owen thinks about Suzie for long moment, though it hurts to bring up any memories with her in them, and his head is thumping. “Why wouldn’t she?” he asks at last.

Tosh doesn’t reply, so he thinks he might have a point.

 

Jack hasn’t so much fallen off the wagon as pushed the wagon over, jumped up and down on it until the planks gave way, wrenched off the wheels and lit the whole fucking thing on fire.

He looks a mess, sprawled damnably alone on the couch in the bus. Tosh and Gwen have gone somewhere else and Ianto still isn’t back, so it’s just them now. Jack with his eyes too sharp and too blue, and Owen wants to leave and can’t.

“She was mine first, you know,” Jack says.

Owen doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t.

“She was my first girlfriend when I moved to the UK,” Jack continues and Owen wants to get up and leave but he can’t and he doesn’t. “I was all alone in London and I was a grad student so I felt too old for all of it but Suzie... God, she was beautiful.”

Owen lets his head drop onto the table, pressing his forehead against his folded arms. “Stop. Talking.”

Jack ignores him. “We were... I don’t know what we were. We were together for a year and then we weren’t _together_ together for a year, and then we met you guys and we were in a band.” His smile twists, cruel and dark, and Owen wishes he could say that none of this is really about him but he knows Jack by now, really knows him, and this is _all_ about him. “And then she was screwing you and she wouldn’t talk to me anymore.”

“This isn’t my fault,” Owen tells the table. The words feel heavy in his mouth.

“I know,” Jack replies easily. Owen sits up, looking warily at him. Jack smiles a little wider. “I’m just telling you that I got to her first.”

Owen gets up and leaves, slamming the door behind him.

 

Ianto finds him somewhere around two in the morning, sitting against one of the wheels and staring into space. 

“I put Jack to bed,” he says, sounding tired. 

“And you didn’t stay there with him?” Owen asks, words like broken glass in his mouth. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone, he doesn’t want to look at anything, he doesn’t want to _think_.

“Wasted and self-loathing isn’t my type,” Ianto says. Owen raises his head and gives Ianto a significant look until he looks away, biting his lip. “I don’t take advantage of people at their weakest point, Owen,” Ianto tells him, and it sounds like a rebuke.

“All right,” Owen says, because he doesn’t have the energy for an argument.

After a moment, Ianto sits down beside him. Owen forces himself not to push him away. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself right now, Owen, and neither do you,” Ianto points out quietly. “So I don’t think leaving’s a good idea.”

“I don’t want to talk about my _feelings_ ,” Owen spits.

“Ok,” Ianto says.

“I don’t even like you.”

“Ok.”

Owen sighs. “I think I was in love with Suzie and I didn’t know until now but I think she did.”

“Ok,” Ianto says, and, after a moment: “and Suzie?”

“It was always about Jack,” Owen replies, “even when it wasn’t.”

Ianto is silent for a while and then, finally, he offers: “isn’t everything?”

 

Somewhere around 2 a.m, Ianto says: “I know you guys all think that Jack held me down and fucked me until I agreed to join the band, but that isn’t actually what happened.”

“We don’t think that,” Owen says quickly, even though it’s a lie.

“Yeah you do,” Ianto replies. “Tosh told me once when she was really drunk.”

Something like a smile but that isn’t quirks Owen’s lips. He doesn’t think he’s physically capable of smiling at the moment, but it’s ok.

“Tosh says a lot of things when she’s drunk,” he says.

“I know,” Ianto replies, and he sounds heavily significant. Owen rolls his head to look at him but Ianto smiles, soft and real, and shakes his head. “Not tonight,” he says.

“All right,” Owen agrees. He tries to remember what they were talking about. “You were saying something about Jack not fucking you.”

Ianto swallows a laugh. “I just wanted to say, I met Jack about fifteen minutes before I met you for the first time. It was Suzie who I became friends with, Suzie who talked me into joining. That’s all.”

Owen knows why Ianto is saying this, but his chest is still stinging. “Did you really work in Starbucks?” he asks.

Ianto frowns. “That was ever in doubt?”

“Jack says a lot of shit,” Owen points out.

Ianto grimaces slightly. “You don’t believe a word anyone says to you, do you, Owen?”

Owen sighs, and doesn’t reply.

 

Ianto falls asleep sometime just after three, head drooping towards his chest, and after a while he shifts and his head winds up on Owen’s shoulder. Owen contemplates pushing him off but ends up moving, cold and stiff, to wrap an arm around Ianto. He turns his face into Ianto’s hair, breathing in hard and ragged. Ianto smells like shampoo and sweat and cigarette smoke and coffee, and Owen threads his fingers into Ianto’s hair, curling them in the just-too-long locks, not quite hard enough to wake him but gripping tight anyway. He breathes in and out, thick and shaky, unable to cry but wishing he could. 

Owen feels like he could break apart in this moment, fall into a hundred shivering pieces, and the only thing stopping him right now is Ianto, warm and silent at his side with his hair carded soft through Owen’s fingers. He closes his eyes and when he eventually opens them again his eyelashes feel wet, though his cheeks are perfectly dry.

Suzie asked after Tosh, after Gwen, after Jack. She talked about the band in general and casually brought up Dianne even after Owen lost contact. But she never, ever, not once mentioned Ianto after she left, and for the first time Owen realises that that was significant. 

_This is such a fucking mess_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud because if he wakes Ianto up then he’ll have to let go.

**.Track Seven.** ( _it’s all right; ‘cause i’ve got a pretty face i guess that i can sing alright_ )

They pull themselves together, because they don’t have a whole lot of options. Owen gives up smoking even though he’s not sure why; just knows that it doesn’t appeal to him anymore. He finds himself angry from nicotine withdrawal but Tosh silently buys him patches and nobody tries to stop him from going outside to get air when it’s getting a little claustrophobic, even though he no longer has a valid excuse. 

“This is so pathetically not rock n’roll,” Owen remarks one morning, slumped over a bowl of cereal with a crashing headache.

“Guess you’ll have to start smashing guitars onstage,” Jack tells him, smirking.

They’re ok; not great, but ok. They don’t talk about Suzie and somehow everything else has fallen into place.

“I will when you start paying for them,” Owen replies, sticking a round patch to the inside of his left arm. 

Jack smiles into his coffee cup – Ianto’s making them all coffee today, and of course it’s the best coffee ever. Owen suspects Ianto is just trying to prove a point, but whatever he’s doing, they’re getting coffee out of it – and it’s soft and domestic and almost fine for a moment.

Tosh walks out of the bunks area, phone in one hand. “Owen, it’s the police for you.”

“What?” Owen asks, floored.

“They’ve found Suzie’s suicide note,” Tosh explains, “it’s addressed to you.”

Owen puts his mug down on the table that coffee sloshes all over it and bolts, hearing Ianto say his name but not looking back. His stomach is twisting and, after a moment, he brings his breakfast straight back up again.

 

“Suicide note” doesn’t really seem a fitting way to describe the post-its shoved into an envelope with _For Owen_ written on it in pink sharpie. After a brief discussion with the police back in the UK, Owen gets photographs of them emailed to him.

There’s a fragment of an Emily Dickinson poem on the first one. And then the words _twinkle twinkle, little star_ – Owen can’t work out if he’s supposed to feel guilty about this or not; sod Suzie and her ambiguities – and then _I DON’T WANT ANY OF YOU AT MY FUNERAL_ – _fair enough_ , Owen thinks, and refuses to acknowledge just how deeply that aches – and finally the simple phrase _nothing’s ever over_.

He closes the lid of his laptop and Tosh is waiting for him; she pulls him wordlessly into a hug and Owen lets her because he thinks he might shatter otherwise.

“She’s definitely dead, isn’t she?” he asks quietly.

“Definitely dead,” Tosh agrees, words quivering in her mouth. 

Owen sighs and lets her go. “Suzie was mad as a hatter, wasn’t she?”

Tosh’s lips quirk, just slightly. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Tea?”

 

Tour insomnia isn’t anything new and Owen is used to it by now, to sitting by the window in their lounge area and watching lights flash past; they’ve got miles to cover tonight and he should sleep, he really should, but he can’t. He’s not thinking about anything in particular, slumped on the sofa and staring at the darkness outside. The others are asleep and there’s something comforting about that, about being the only one awake.

Well, he’s the only one awake until he glances back towards the bunks area and finds that Ianto is standing there and watching him. He’s fully dressed but he hasn’t put the lights on; they’re mostly in shadow and anything casually cruel about cleaning products that Owen was going to say dies in his mouth. He sits very still, saying nothing, staring at Ianto and waiting for something to shatter. Ianto straightens up and Owen thinks for a moment that he’s going to go to bed, but then he crosses over to him. Owen has enough time to see Ianto’s blank expression momentarily illuminated by a passing light outside before Ianto leans down, cupping Owen’s face in his hands and kissing him.

Owen freezes for a moment and then kisses back, just the wrong side of desperate, curling one hand over the back of Ianto’s neck and pulling him down. One of Ianto’s hands slams against the back of the sofa, his knee braced between Owen’s thighs; the angle is awkward but they don’t break apart long enough to adjust it, dragging each other closer relentlessly, hard enough to bruise in the morning. Owen really doesn’t give a fuck right now, one hand tangling in Ianto’s hair, biting at Ianto’s lower lip, rough and aching and refusing to give an inch. 

It occurs to Owen that someone could walk in on this, _anyone_ could walk in on this; they’re being as quiet as they can but Jack’s an erratic sleeper at best and Tosh and Gwen are hardly much better, and Owen has no idea what he will say if anyone catches them. But the darkness is like a blanket around them, reducing Ianto to patches of white skin that occasionally catch the moonlight or something harsher and more electric at the roadside; it feels unreal. Well, it feels unreal until the hand Ianto isn’t using to brace himself above him fumbles with the fly of Owen’s jeans, pulling it open and then pushing inside to wrap Ianto’s infuriatingly long fingers around his cock.

Owen lets out something like a gasp that Ianto swallows immediately, reaching for Ianto’s own jeans, intent on not thinking about whatever the fuck is happening here because... because he’s got nothing at all to go on. And, Jesus, he’s so glad that he didn’t know before that Ianto apparently elects to go entirely without underwear from time to time. Ianto breathes hard into Owen’s mouth and it’s barely a kiss anymore and they have matching sets of calluses from guitar strings, which is weird but not necessarily bad, and time feels elastic, tight, confusing as the bus drives on through the dark and Ianto’s fingers slide over his cock.

He has no idea whether it’s soon enough to be embarrassed or not when he arches up, stifling a moan in a scrape of teeth across Ianto’s bottom lip; though Ianto follows soon enough, so whichever it is they’re in the same boat. Ianto slides his hand out of Owen’s jeans, wiping his hand across his already ruined t-shirt as he does so, and pulls away. He looks at Owen for a moment and then goes to bed, zipping up his jeans as he does so.

Owen sits for a while, shivering a little though he’s not sure why, until something in his mind snaps and clears and he scrabbles through the mess on their table for a biro and a piece of paper.

 

Jack’s an early riser but Owen knows this, so he’s already changed his clothes by the time Jack comes staggering into the lounge area, looking for coffee.

“You’re up early,” he says.

“Haven’t been to bed,” Owen replies distractedly, writing down one final word and a definitive full stop.

Jack puts the kettle on and then comes to sit beside him; Owen doesn’t trust himself to read back through what he’s written, so he just hands it straight over. Jack raises an eyebrow at him and then looks back down at the paper. He reads through it slowly; the kettle boils and Jack doesn’t seem to notice, so Owen gets up and makes them both cups of tea. When he comes back, Jack is humming one of the chord progressions Owen jotted down.

“This...” Jack exhales slowly, more than a sigh. “This is incredible,” he says. “It’s... I don’t think there are words.”

Owen scrapes together a smile, lets a shrug be his only reply.

“Do you want to sing it?” Jack asks.

“I wrote it for your voice,” Owen tells him.

“That’s fucked-up,” Jack says.

Owen grimaces. “Well, most things about this situation are.”

Jack looks at the song again, fingers of one hand tracing over the scribbled biro letters. “Just one thing... you can’t call it _They Keep Killing Suzie_.”

“Too morbid?” Owen guesses. “Too personal?”

“Something like that,” Jack agrees. 

Owen thinks about it for a moment, and then leans over, crossing out the original title and replacing it with _Random Shoes_. “There,” he says.

Jack smiles at him; a soft smile, something more real than the blindingly charismatic ones he throws around all the time. “Get some sleep, Owen,” he says.

He feels the tiredness crash down on him suddenly, as though he could sleep for days on end, and barely makes it to his bunk before he passes out completely.

**.Track Eight.** ( _i’m boring but overcompensate with headlines and flash flash flash photography; but don’t pretend you ever forget ‘bout me_ )

Owen is not-having his morning cigarette by the side of the road a few days later. _Random Shoes_ is being sorted out by Tosh now; she weaves rhythms and melodies effortlessly together, taking the jagged, helpless words Owen spilled out in the dead of night with a handful of chords and a burning memory and making them into something more than that, something solid and honest and reasonable enough to fit on an album somewhere. She’s making it into the song Suzie actually deserves and Owen is grateful to her.

“I bring Ianto Coffee,” Gwen announces, carefully carrying two mugs out of the bus and coming to join him, a careful, companionable smile on her face. They’re all careful around each other at the moment, maybe afraid of what they could wind up saying if they don’t.

“Thanks,” Owen says, accepting the mug.

They stand shoulder to shoulder and watch cars drive by for a few minutes, and Owen sips at his coffee to give him something to do with his hands. That’s what he hates most about giving up smoking, he thinks; his fingers feel useless, empty.

“Our lives are insane,” Owen remarks quietly.

Gwen laughs beside him. “I suppose that’s what you get for living the dream,” she says. It should sound cheesy, ridiculous, but she carries it off well.

“This wasn’t ever my dream,” Owen shrugs.

He can feel Gwen’s gaze on him; curious, thoughtful. “So what did you want to be when you grew up?” she asks.

Owen drops his gaze to his trainers. “Left alone,” he replies.

“Well,” Gwen sighs, “you really buggered that one up, then.”

“Yeah,” Owen agrees flatly, “I really did.”

 

They’re playing in the same city as The Time Agents so they’re all half-expecting a repeat of last time; violence and sex, the things that Jack seems to trail after him in droves. But Jack disappears pretty quick after their show, leaving the four of them to get casually drunk and mingle with fans without him. That’s fine; Owen and Ianto might be kind of having difficulty speaking to each other at the moment, but it’s a pretty good night anyway.

Jack still isn’t back in the morning, and Tosh is surfing the internet while Gwen and Ianto make something resembling breakfast.

“Oh,” Tosh says, “well, that explains a lot.”

They crowd around her computer and there, in a hundred different youtube videos and a handful of entertainment news websites, is Jack onstage at with The Time Agents. He and John are sharing a microphone and looking stupidly happy while singing together, while teenage girls practically scream the place down.

Owen studies them; the picture isn’t particularly great but it’s enough, and he’s not sure that he’s ever seen Jack look at anyone like that. Not ever.

“That is interesting,” Owen agrees quietly, while the ignored toaster starts spitting black smoke.

 

Lisa has gone to _The Sun_ – that oh-so-classy tabloid newspaper – and done some sort of exposé on her relationship with Ianto. Owen finds this out when Yvonne, their manager, rings Jack up at an unholy hour and starts screaming down the phone, and he reads the article himself on the _Sun_ ’s website.

“When were you going to tell us that you broke up?” he asks Ianto later, when Ianto himself is skimming the interview, looking tired.

Ianto shrugs. “She called it off a couple of days before Suzie died. By the time I was ready to tell you guys... it wasn’t really the moment.”

Owen is about decide that that explains everything, fair enough, when he recalls that the first time Ianto kissed him he was definitely still in a relationship. He’s honestly giving up on having a reason for any of this, he really is.

He sighs and reads the interview again over Ianto’s shoulder; it’s pretty standard stuff, pointedly mean about all of Ianto’s flaws – Owen feels weirdly protective; _he’s_ the one who gets to say cruel shit about Ianto and his OCD cleaning tendencies – and with a few in no way subtle hints about Ianto being epically in love with Jack.

“Shouldn’t you be getting defensive and going to explain yourself to Jack?” Owen asks, and if there’s any trace of bitterness in his voice, well, fuck, it’s been a weird month.

Ianto shrugs. “We’re all kind of in love with Jack, this is hardly ground-breaking news,” he points out. “Besides, she’s managed to just come off sounding like a jealous ex so no one’s going to take this seriously anyway.” A smirk flickers over his mouth. “And she didn’t say anything at all about you, so really, you don’t have anything to complain about.”

Owen raises an eyebrow. “ _Should_ she have something to say about me?” he asks.

Ianto’s expression remains blank; it’s like talking to a fucking brick wall sometimes.

“Fine,” Owen says, getting up from the table and wishing he could use needing a cigarette as an excuse to escape, “well, if you want to convince the world that you’re not madly pining over Jack, you might want to stop singing his songs in the shower.”

He walks away, and ignores Ianto shouting: “convince the world or convince _you_?” after him.

 

The show is filled with a kind of crazy energy that night; the fans are cheering for Ianto louder than anyone else, evidently to show some kind of support, and teenage girls scream anytime Jack and Ianto get anywhere near each other. Owen isn’t surprised; he’s snooped around on the internet a few times and has frequently wished afterwards that he hadn’t. The things the girls write about them are insane and kind of filthy, and most of them aren’t even physically possible with the tour bus bunks being the size they are. 

Gwen is on fire tonight, beating the drums harder than is really necessary – she’s pissed about the whole Lisa thing, which is stupid because it’s not like Lisa told everyone about Gwen’s inability to remain monogamous – and Tosh’s fingers are practically a blur over her keyboard. The audience scream the entirety of _Small Worlds_ back at them, absolutely word-perfect in a way that makes Owen’s spine crackle because he can still remember when they were writing that song, yelling at each other until Jack threw a box of takeaway chow mein at the wall and left, and now it’s one of their defining hits. Ianto’s wearing more eyeliner than usual and Owen doesn’t miss the way Ianto isn’t looking at him, _deliberately_ isn’t looking at him in a way that almost makes him lose the beat a couple of times.

Afterwards, they’re barely offstage before Ianto grabs his wrist and they lose themselves in the corridors full of people. They fuck in the backstage bathrooms, quick and vicious, Ianto’s fingers digging into his skin and their bodies sliding and bumping messily together, shifting to a rhythm Owen will later recognise as belonging to _Exit Wounds_ , a song Jack doesn’t have any words in at all. 

When they’ve vaguely tidied themselves up they stumble out of the cramped stall; they both looked wrecked, Owen can see in the mirrors, make-up smeared and mouths friction red and clothes crumpled incriminatingly.

Ianto heads straight for the door.

“What the fuck _is_ this?” Owen demands.

“I don’t know, Owen,” Ianto replies, and he sounds tired, “why don’t you have a go at classifying something in your life for once?”

The door bangs shut behind him.

 

“Adam’s coming to visit,” Tosh informs him happily the next day when they’re on the bus driving to wherever it is that they’re going next. The others are asleep, though it’s about lunch time; their body clocks are seriously fucked-up by now.

“Can he bring a lot of hard drugs?” Owen asks dully.

“Don’t you have friends in the medical profession who can provide you with those?” Tosh asks.

Owen shrugs, managing not to say _not anymore_. He shrugs. “Eh.”

Tosh folds her arms and looks stern. “Ok, talk to me.”

He thinks about it for a moment and then remembers that this is _Tosh_ , not Gwen or Jack or Suzie or even Ianto himself, and he doesn’t have to dance around it. “Tell me how I feel about Ianto.”

Tosh doesn’t blink. “You’ve wanted to shag him for as long as you’ve known him and everyone knows it,” she replies calmly. “And by everyone I mean _everyone_ , including Suzie and Dianne and even Lisa.” She shrugs. “I used to be quite jealous of him, back in the day.”

Owen suspected it was going to be something like that, though hearing it aloud doesn’t help. “ _Shit_ ,” he mumbles.

**.Track Nine.** ( _who’d you rather be; the beatles or the rolling stones?_ )

“The thing about Suzie,” Jack begins, like this is a conversation that Owen actually wants to have half an hour before they’re due onstage with the audience already screaming along to the support band outside, which it isn’t, by the way, “is that she was always fixated with her own mortality. You must have noticed that.”

“We’re doing this _now_?” he asks, running a hand through his hair. It’ll screw it up from ‘artfully messed up’ to ‘I was outside in some kind of tornado’ but he doesn’t care.

Jack shrugs. “Some of it. And we’ll be doing it for the rest of our lives, so you might as well get used to it.”

Owen obediently sits down; his jeans are probably too tight to allow actual _sitting_ but, what the hell, he can carry off this look as well as anyone.

“All right,” he says, “Suzie was morbid as hell. The first time I met her in a situation where we were sober, she was reading Emily Dickinson. And she said most of it made sense to her.”

Jack’s mouth twists slightly. “Yeah, she said that to me too. Should’ve been the first sign really.”

This isn’t an easy conversation for either of them, but at least Jack’s better at covering than he is. Owen has no idea what his expression has in it right now.

“The first sign that she was going to kill herself?” he snaps.

Jack shrugs, awkward but still somehow smooth. “If you’re terrified of life and death and just how random they are, then maybe you want to take out the element of surprise, exert some control.”

In a crazy sort of way, it actually makes sense. Owen bloody wishes that it didn’t. “You sound like you’ve thought about it,” he says.

Jack’s smile is twisted. “Who says I haven’t?” He stands up, clapping a hand on Owen’s shoulder. “Well, I’d better go see where my band has gotten to. And you might want to do something about your hair.”

Owen sits there for a good five minutes after he’s gone.

 

They’re signing autographs after the show; black sharpies wending their way across pictures and posters and paper and tickets and, on occasion, skin – though Owen has decided against signing breasts now, it’s just too weird – while they smile and nod and laugh and promise to come back and play again soon. Owen is less shit at all this than he used to think he would be, and sometimes it’s reassuring, like his bedside manner wouldn’t have been as crap as he always thinks it would have been.

Dr Owen Harper. Just another spectre of something that never was.

Lisa calls Ianto shortly after they’ve all piled into the showers, washing off sweat and glitter and make-up until they resemble people again; she must have timed it perfectly to coincide with this, and it makes Owen hate her a little bit, hate her a little more than he admittedly already does. Which is ridiculous because he’s pretty sure that he’s managed to betray and hurt Ianto far worse than Lisa ever has and he has the advantage of years of acquaintance to back up every cruel thing he says, but whatever: Ianto’s ex girlfriend is way worse than Owen is. Somehow.

Ianto gets very drunk that night; Jack buys him the tequila shots he demands but stays with him, sipping at his mineral water and looking nonchalant but Owen can see just how sharply his eyes are fixed on Ianto.

“Is Adam ever going to do this to you?” Owen asks; he’s watching Ianto too, though he’s pretending that he isn’t.

Tosh shrugs. “If you mean break up with me, well, maybe. How do I know? And if you mean sell out my story to the newspapers, well, he knows just how much blackmail material I have on him, so probably not.”

That’s what it always comes down to, Owen reflects, just who’s got the power at any given moment. At who has the power to rip the world out from under the other person’s feet. 

It occurs to him just who’s got the power here, between him and Ianto, and he doesn’t like the answer. He really doesn’t.

“I’m going back to the bus,” he mumbles to Tosh.

She frowns. “You don’t want to stay here and watch Ianto inevitably falling off his barstool and having to be carried home?”

“Not particularly, no,” Owen replies. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Tosh’s expression changes into something devious, something Owen really doesn’t like. “Jack has no scruples about taking advantage of people when they’re drunk,” she points out. “You don’t want to stay here and keep an eye on them?”

“I don’t care,” Owen tells her, and at this moment in time, it’s true.

“You’re a twat,” Tosh tells him.

“Yeah,” Owen sighs, and leaves.

 

They get to the next city mid-afternoon the next day; Tosh and Gwen decide that shoe-shopping is a necessity and disappear somewhere in a flurry of giggles – _girls_ , seriously – and Jack apparently has friends here and wanders off to “catch up”, which is probably code for “shagging”; it usually is.

Owen didn’t sleep while they were driving so he dozes on the couch, restless and irritated and not even sure why. Ianto comes wandering through the lounge a while later, looking somewhat worse for wear, though when he smiles at Owen he still manages to look condescending. When Owen follows him into their kitchen area, he finds Ianto is cleaning out their sink with a look of careful concentration, the rest of the world blocked out.

Sometimes, he finds himself thinking that Ianto was raised in a cupboard, probably one with a bottle of Dettol in it. It would explain a lot.

“You shouldn’t let what that bitch says get to you,” he offers, cold comfort or something like it.

Ianto doesn’t look at him. “Don’t call her that.”

“Ianto, Lisa fucked you over completely. You have every right to call her a bitch.”

“Maybe,” Ianto replies neutrally, knuckles white on the sponge, “but you don’t.”

“Ianto, she _is_ a bitch,” Owen can’t help saying, though he really should stop and he knows he should. “She dated you, broke up with you and then went to the newspapers to tell them that you were in hopeless gay love with your lead singer and that you were a pretty shitty lover; which isn’t something I’ve experienced, actually,” he finds himself adding, “maybe kind of emotionally detached, but well, I kind of thought that was something to do with me. I could always call Lisa up and ask, I suppose...”

Ianto punches him. “Jesus _fuck_ , Owen,” he breathes, “why do you always have to be such a _cunt_?”

If Ianto’s breaking out the big swearwords then Owen knows he’s really hit a nerve. “I don’t know,” he says, honest enough, “but _you’re_ the one who keeps jumping me.” Ianto isn’t looking at him, cleaning task forgotten, hands shoved into his jeans pockets. “And why is that, Ianto?”

“Piss off, Owen,” Ianto mutters, low and hard.

“You’ve already punched me,” Owen points out, “unless you’re planning on going for a kitchen knife next, I think I might as well stay here and push. What changed? Seriously, why _now_?”

Ianto meets his, eyes narrowed and angry. “I got tired of you watching and waiting and not doing anything at all,” he snaps. “Years and years of _nothing_ , Owen, and you never did anything, not one little thing, not once.”

“Do you even want this?” Owen demands, “is this just some kind of _experiment_?”

“ _Years_ of you watching me,” Ianto snarls, ignoring the question, “and not knowing what the hell was going on in your head, Owen. And I still don’t. Now get the fuck out of the kitchen and leave me alone.”

Owen doesn’t want to but he’s not sure what they have left to say to each other right now.

He obediently walks out.

 

“So, did you ever try to kill yourself?”

As conversation openers go, it isn’t the most tactful. Jack bursts out laughing.

“God, Owen, we should get you a book on social interaction.”

Owen shrugs. “If it’s the same one you use I can go without; I quite like being able to talk to people without hitting on them.”

Jack mumbles something that sounds kind of a lot like _yeah, and look how well that shit’s been going with Ianto_ , but it’s quiet enough for Owen not to be able to call him on it.

“You’re avoiding the question,” Owen points out, sitting down beside him.

The lighting technicians are buggering about, working out which angles they want to best highlight just how sparkly Tosh and Gwen really are, and Ianto is talking to one of their roadies, laughing about something too far away for Owen to catch.

“What makes you think I did?” Jack asks distractedly.

Owen shrugs. “You seemed to get what was going on in Suzie’s head pretty well.”

Jack tips his head to one side. “I’m not going to live forever,” he says at last. “And it took me kind of a while to get that, because for ages I thought that I really _was_ , that I was invincible and nothing could touch me.” He glances at Owen, rueful smirk on his lips, “cocaine can do that to you, ok, but it was also my attitude. I never got sick, never got hurt, and I was really young and really damn stupid.”

“So what changed?” Owen asks.

“I overdosed,” Jack replies, “me and Suzie both; you guys never found out because we hid it from you, figured you’d quit the band if you found out just how crazy we both were, and I can’t even tell you what we overdosed on because I don’t even know, something Katie gave us.”

Katie is another of Owen’s ex girlfriends, but he tends to pretend that she isn’t. Katie was _crazy_ , and not even the fun kind of crazy.

“So I worked it out,” Jack explains, “once we’d gotten out of casualty and everything; I’m not going to live forever. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t work on it a little.”

“So that was why you went into rehab,” Owen says slowly, things clicking.

“Yep,” Jack replies. “And, you know, I’m still working on it. Maybe one day I’ll get there.”

He gets up and abruptly walks over to Tosh and Gwen, throwing a smile over his mouth, superhuman as always. Owen frowns; he’d never realised that Jack was actually in any way _self-aware_.

“Fucking hell, Harkness,” he mumbles, and looks away from where Ianto is ignoring him again.

**.Track Ten.** ( _take my heart while you’re at it, why don’t you sign me up to sell me out? hardcore superstar by far, you’re the ultimate star_ )

Owen quits the band on a Thursday.

There’s context, but not a lot of it.

 

They have a TV interview coming up; Owen can’t remember what the channel is, but whatever, anyway, they get to babble inanely for a while and play a couple of songs.

“Get those toothy grins out, everybody,” Jack tells them, revealing his own.

“Your teeth are somewhat sinister,” Ianto remarks, smirking, before returning to intently disinfecting the blinds. Owen can’t even be bothered to comment on this; there’s no point.

“I bloody _hate_ interviews,” he sighs.

“You hate everything,” Gwen points out reasonably.

“Yeah, well,” Owen shrugs, “I mean, it’s kind of justified, isn’t it?”

And they’re all looking at him now, even Ianto, and it’s been a very long and very strange month. They’re in a foreign country far too far from home and they’re playing the same songs over and over and over until new meanings are starting to bleed from them, new meanings that they never intended, and Suzie is _dead_ and Ianto is either playing a really complicated game or has no fucking idea what he’s doing and Owen is beginning to suspect it’s the second option, which is never good.

So something inside him just snaps.

“Look,” he says, and he’s trying to sound reasonable but his voice is too loud, much too loud, “we’re five people who have fucking nothing in common. Even our sociopathic personality traits don’t match up. We play this music and we fake it but we hate each other.” Fuck, he’s tired and he really shouldn’t say this, he knows he shouldn’t, and the others are just staring at him. “We _hate_ each other but we stay here because we want the fucking fame and the fucking money and... I don’t even know why I do this anymore.” He’s breathing too hard and the world seems to have become very small and very hot. “You know what? Fuck this and fuck all of you. I’m done.”

And he walks out.

 

“Well, that was certainly a display of staggering mental stability,” Ianto says two hours later when he’s found him.

“Did Jack throw a lamp after me?” Owen asks, and then changes his mind. “Actually, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

Ianto chokes on a laugh and slides into the booth opposite him; Owen’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be in this random bar and he doesn’t even know how Ianto found him, but what the hell. He sits there, looking casual in a t-shirt and jeans, and his hair is still too long and Owen still, in spite of everything, wants to touch it.

He sits there and says nothing and stares at Ianto’s hands spread flat on the table top and remembers the last night they had in a hotel; Ianto spread him out on his back on one of their single beds with all the lights off and fucked him through it, fucked him until Owen couldn’t breathe anything but Ianto, until it was hard to say whose body was whose, they were so numb from the friction, until they were both bruised and bitten and shaking and clutching each other too tight, clenching fingers that couldn’t and wouldn’t let go. Well, Owen reflects, if he really _has_ actually quit Torchwood then at least he’ll be free of trying to work out what the hell is going on; if nothing else, it’s become increasingly clear that neither of them have any idea what it is they’re doing.

“I have two things to say,” Ianto informs him quietly, “and you’re going to shut up and listen.”

Owen considers this. “Are either of them ‘I don’t want you to go’?”

“No.”

Owen sits back a little, wraps his fingers around his mostly-empty beer bottle. “Ok then.”

“Firstly,” Ianto says, “you can’t leave because you have nowhere to go. And I mean it. You have no degree, no job prospects, and if you go now you’ll just wind up working in a shop somewhere with people periodically saying _aren’t you that guy who used to be in that band?_ And that’s it. That’s all. If you hang around for another album at least you might be able to get a shitty book deal out of it.”

Owen refuses to respond to any of that, because it’s horribly true and he’s feeling claustrophobic now. “And what was the other thing?”

“We don’t actually all hate each other, you know.”

“That’s a lie,” Owen snaps.

“No, it isn’t,” Ianto replies, and his smile is a little lopsided, a little sad. “We don’t always like each other very much, that’s true, but we don’t all _hate_ each other.” He holds a hand up as Owen tries to protest. “No, what you’re doing is projecting the fact that you hate us onto everyone else and making assumptions.” Ianto looks thoughtful, reaching for Owen’s beer and finishing it off for him. “Oh, and that’s another thing, actually. Thing two, subsection b: you don’t hate us.”

“You don’t know a fucking thing about how I feel about anyone,” Owen points out.

“If you actually hated us you’d have walked away years ago,” Ianto says calmly. “And we both know that. You might not like us much, but you don’t hate us. You’re just...” he sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on in your head right now, Owen, but you don’t want to leave and you don’t hate us either.”

Owen’s mouth twists. “You should never consider a career in motivational speaking.”

Ianto stands up. “I’ll see you at the bus later,” he says.

“You seem awfully sure of yourself,” Owen snaps.

Ianto shrugs. “You have nowhere else to go,” he points out. He turns away, and then turns back again. “And Jack threw a chair after you,” he adds.

Owen considers this. “Does this make me more important than Suzie, or do we just have a limited amount of furniture that isn’t nailed down at the moment?”

“That’s quite philosophical,” Ianto says, and: “I’ll see you later.”

 

That night, when everyone has decided to Never Speak Of Today Again and they’re all in bed, Ianto crawls into Owen’s bunk with him. It’s dark and warm but Ianto doesn’t touch him, just lies there, and Owen eventually shifts to accommodate him.

“I didn’t want you to go,” Ianto admits in a scrape of a whisper.

“I don’t think I was ever really going anywhere,” Owen replies, finally acknowledging it for the first time. It feels heavy in his chest, settling there like a promise and a curse in one, and this is why he normally lets Ianto and Tosh write the lyrics, his own always end up being kind of melodramatic.

He falls asleep listening to the sound of Ianto breathing.

**.Track Eleven.** ( _when you’re singing i’ll be with you ‘til the exit line_ )

“I need help,” Owen admits.

Jack’s mouth quirks. “And you came to me? You must be desperate.”

Owen shrugs. “You know everyone and you’re fucked-up and you’ve taken just about every drug ever and you’re still alive, you must know a decent therapist or something, I don’t know.”

There are trees rushing past outside the windows. Ianto and Tosh are cooking lunch, Gwen is calling Rhys from her bunk. Owen doesn’t know if it involves phone sex; he doesn’t want to.

Jack raises his eyebrows. “You want a therapist?”

Owen doesn’t know. Owen doesn’t know what he wants and he’s beginning to think that that’s more than just ennui that comes from unexpected fame and possibly it needs someone else to help him feel something other than angry and passive.

He shrugs. “I tried to quit the band a few days ago. Suzie killed herself and I don’t talk to Dianne anymore and everyone in the world seems to know that I’m in love with Ianto except me.”

“So it’s about Ianto?” Jack asks, looking a weird mixture of amused and annoyed.

“It’s not about Ianto,” Owen says quickly. “Or maybe it is. I don’t know. I’m starting to think I might be a little bit insane.”

Jack tips his head to one side. “There’s the good kind of insane and there’s the bad kind of insane and when you’re not sure which is which, that’s when you need help.”

“Thank you, fortune cookie,” Owen snaps. “Do you know someone or not?”

When Jack smiles, it’s genuine and reassuring. “I’ll put you in touch with Martha when we get home,” he says. “She got me into rehab the first time, she’s pretty good.”

Owen nods. “Is she an ex boyfriend of yours?” he can’t help asking.

Jack laughs. “Isn’t _everyone_?”

Owen suspects that Jack probably knows a lot more than he actually lets on.

 

The interviewer _loves_ Gwen and Ianto’s Welsh accents – clearly the Americans need more bands with Welsh people in them – and spends most of the interview flirting with Jack. This is par for the course with pretty much all interviews, though, so Owen manages not to stare directly at the camera and stays fairly quiet, sandwiched between Tosh and Ianto. At one point, when nobody’s looking at them and the camera is trained on Jack and Gwen teasing each other about something – it screams _hey, look, our band can do heterosexuality sometimes!_ but Owen isn’t really in a position to judge – Ianto’s fingers curl through his, just briefly.

They’re not really talking and they haven’t had sex in over a week. Owen’s decided that he’s psychologically incapable of categorising what’s happening now, it’s Ianto’s turn to take over and angst for a while.

He skates by on a couple of comments on how he’s glad he dropped out of being in med school and how being in a band is much more fun, and smiles the smile that Tosh and Gwen have approved as being genuinely charming.

They play their forthcoming single – _A Day In The Death_ , which isn’t nearly as emo as it sounds, by the way – and also _Small Worlds_ , and Owen thinks that they’ve got through this whole thing pretty well, actually.

He pushes Ianto up against the mirror in the dressing room and kisses him for as many breathless minutes as they can cram in before they hear footsteps outside; Ianto tastes like the TV make-up they’re all covered in but his eyes are bright, warm, intense.

“I’m pretty messed up,” Owen says without preamble, “and when we get back to England I’m apparently going to a therapist who Jack has recommended and who he has almost definitely slept with. So. You know.”

“You should definitely have said that in the interview,” is all Ianto replies. “It has ‘soundbite’ written all over it.”

“You’re such a bastard,” Owen says, but for the first time there’s something fond in his voice.

 

Adam and Tosh are ridiculously, sickeningly sweet.

“He is pretty good-looking,” Gwen remarks, when they’re spying on the two of them out of the bus window.

“You still have a fiancé,” Owen reminds her.

“I do,” Gwen agrees, with that soft smile she gets whenever anyone mentions Rhys. Now _that’s_ a bloody weird relationship right there, but Owen has heard that phrase about people in glass houses and throwing stones.

“Of course he’s good-looking,” Jack cuts in, “I have good taste.”

“In shags or drug dealers?” Owen asks before he can stop himself.

Jack shrugs, smirking. “Why not both?”

Jack’s life philosophies are deceptively simple, and Owen sometimes thinks that he should write a book. They could sell it off their website and everything. Of course, then they’d have a whole world full of people thinking like Jack, and, well, that’s a thought.

They all scramble to look nonchalant as Tosh and Adam turn towards the bus, falling across each other as they sit around on the couch. The door opens.

“I would run while you can, Adam,” Owen says, “this bus breeds insanity.”

He’s only half-joking.

“I think I’ll risk it,” Adam says. “It’s probably just the smell of bleach and coffee, anyway.”

They all frown at each other; they’ve been living on here so long that they no longer notice how it smells. Cleaning products and Starbucks are better options than lots of the others at their disposal, Owen reasons, though possibly Ianto shouldn’t have free reign anymore.

Tosh looks happy, stupidly so, and Owen can’t be arsed to feel bitter about it; instead, he scrapes up a mostly real smile and she winks in reply.

 

It’s kind of weird when their last night rolls around. Owen only realises that it really genuinely _is_ the final night when he sees the date printed at the bottom of one of their merchandise t-shirts – he’s still weirded out by the thought of people wearing clothes with his _face_ on them, but what the hell, if it makes them happy – and the atmosphere is electric. They’re on fire tonight, pushing harder than they ever have before, and maybe tonight is the night they finally raise the roof. Jack kisses all of them just for the wave of hysterical sound they get in reaction, Gwen throws her drumsticks to the crowd after they’ve finished playing _Fragments_ for the encore, people are dancing and singing and screaming and Owen thinks that he can’t walk away from this; not now, not anymore. It’s a strange feeling but not necessarily a bad one.

There’s a party afterwards, too much alcohol and too many people and it’s still kind of amazing. Owen has no idea how John Hart got in here but whatever he and Jack are doing could possibly be considered almost sweet if it wasn’t so damn creepy, and Owen feels detached from all of it but doesn’t hate it the way he used to. He thinks maybe he can get used to this.

Somewhere around 4 a.m. Ianto drags him back to the bus and they have sweaty, drunken, adrenalin-fuelled sex. Ianto admits he has no idea what the hell is going on, Owen says that he suspects they’re both rebound guys despite the fact that the girls they were with were rebounds in the first place, and Ianto tells him that thinking like that makes his head hurt so in the end they both fall asleep, crammed awkwardly into Ianto’s bunk.

Jack and John have made them all breakfast the next morning. “ _A Day In The Death_ made it to number one in the UK,” Jack says. “And also in Austria.”

“Oh good,” Tosh says blearily. “Are those pancakes?”

**.Track Twelve.** ( _i think it’s perfectly clear we’re in the wrong band; ginger is always sincere, just not to one man_ )

Tosh usually sits next to Owen on planes because she’s quiet and tends not to fidget too much or get ridiculously drunk on those little tiny bottles of alcohol – although admittedly Jack doesn’t do that anymore; he seems to be serious about sobriety this time – but today Ianto drops into the seat next to his.

“I am not joining the mile high club with you,” Owen informs him before they’ve even taken off. It’s too early in the morning for all this.

“It’s ok,” Ianto says, “I have a book.”

Gwen is already asleep on Jack’s shoulder and Tosh is immersed in a copy of _Vogue_ , yawning behind a pair of sunglasses. Owen thinks about England and all the things that are and aren’t waiting for him there and his stomach twists, just a little. 

“I called Martha, by the way,” Jack says casually, while the cabin crew are demonstrating what to do in case of an emergency. “She says she can slot you in somewhere.”

“Does she get a surname?” Owen asks, watching an air hostess pretend to put on a life jacket.

“It’s Jones,” Jack tells him, grin wicked and nothing short of pure _evil_. “Dr Martha Jones.”

“Oh,” Ianto says, stifling a laugh into Owen’s shoulder, “well, that’s suitably Freudian.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Owen tells him, driving an elbow into his stomach.

Tosh is laughing, though she’s hiding it well behind her magazine.

“Let’s go home,” Ianto says softly, as the plane begins taxiing towards the runway. He looks at Owen as he says it, and Owen has no idea if Ianto is saying _let’s have a lot of sex_ or _let’s meet for coffee sometime_ or _let’s never speak again_ and, weirdly enough, right now all those options seem attractive. Maybe by the time they’ve landed he’ll have actually chosen one.

“All right,” he says, comfortably aware of how they’re pressed together all along his left-hand side, much too close, “yeah, let’s go home.”

{ **end** }


End file.
